What if star trek was real

Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters 33 feet. If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B.

Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Proxima Centauri here we come, right? The warp drive would require either negative mass — a theorized type of matter — or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option.

To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance.

This imbalance results in negative energy density. But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter. Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a meter bubble would require the mass of the entire visible universe. Today, messages can be distributed to thousands of people instantly. So those 15 or so actors used to represent anything from a small village to an entire planet could all just stay home.

Wolf Blitzer had a more advanced touchscreen on election night than Worf ever had manning the photon torpedoes on the Enterprise. There's not a smartphone or antique tricorder, if you prefer on the market that wouldn't put these stagnant displays to shame. On TNG, the displays could seemingly handle any command, but their buttons were largely stagnant.

Even though the show anticipated tablets, the Enterprise's were clearly driven by touch controls. No doubt, many of these choices were made to control budget. But how strange is it that pinch-to-zoom simply doesn't exist on the flagship of the Federation?

Maybe 24th-century folks are still afraid of a patent lawsuit from Apple. The original Star Trek was sometimes scrapped together with borderline trash. The famous warp effect alone, created by ILM, would be a lot simpler to make in it's about 5 minutes of work in After Effects these days. But watch an old episode. The effect holds up. Still, the show featured a lot of images of the ship orbiting planets that tended to look the same, and zooming through space that wasn't much more detailed than a black screen with a few lights on it.

Today we could show a litany of real intergalactic imagery. Thanks to projects like the Hubble Space Telescope and multiple generations of Mars rovers, we have unprecedented views of both distant galaxies and nearby planets—images the Voyager missions could only dream of. Just take a few minutes to dig through NASA's catalog.

It'd be ridiculous not to make decent use of these incredible vistas. They're more incredible than anything we could ever dream up. He might still have asked King Features for the rights to Flash Gordon in , and still might have ended up writing endless drafts of his space opera. Lucas saw all those static, submarine-style battles in Star Trek , and dreamed of a space adventure with dogfights instead.

But in that case, some other director would have made a giant space fantasy movie, because lots of directors were interested in the notion at that time. One of the hardest scenarios to imagine is what science fiction fans would look like without Star Trek.

Gene Roddenberry showed the pilot at WorldCon, and collaborated with fan campaigners like Bjo Trimble on the letter-writing campaign that kept Trek on the air. Isaac Asimov remembers casually walking over to the first Star Trek convention in the s, expecting it to be a relatively small affair for maybe a few hundred fans at most. But when he got there, he was surprised and delighted to see thousands. Fans had been active in creating and shaping science fiction since the days of Hugo Gernsback, but Trek was the first big media franchise to engage fans in that way—and the fans reacted in kind by creating media-oriented conventions of their own.

And meanwhile, Star Trek gave a hypospray full of adrenaline to writers of fan-fiction. These stories, in which Captain Kirk and Mr. And just as women felt empowered to write stories about love affairs between Kirk and Spock, they also became key members of the Star Trek fan community in general.

While Trek gets credit for inspiring gizmos like iPads and medical scanners, it gets far less credit for the amount of people it energized to pursue fields like space exploration—especially women and people of color, who saw a diverse crew and realized that they, too, could go to the final frontier.

The presence of Lt. Some of the many problems are discussed on Wikipedia. And the chances it will happen in the next hundred years I would put at less than 0. And, of course, there is more. Take technology like the Holodeck. Arthur C. Holograms are images that appear to have three-dimensional structure.

However, we do have some pretty impressive virtual reality technology that can simulate actual places and activities. Likewise, augmented reality is progressing day-by-day. So, in a sense, we are getting there.

Warp and ion drives, Mr. Data, fusion engines…and a whole lot of other major projects are still major engineering challenges.